Jim Powell will remain as president of the citizens’ group that seeks to change Peoria’s public school system from the top down. But he and his wife, Stephanie, plan to send their two sons to Peoria Christian School for the coming school year.

After a stressful year, he said his family must do what’s best for their kids. The stress includes an incident in which Stephanie Powell was barred from school property without an appointment after an encounter with District 150 Superintendent Grenita Lathan last December. The order was lifted later.

More broadly, the chaos at the top, Powell said, referring to Lathan’s leadership, particularly the constant turnover in principals, funnels to teachers and classrooms.

He opposes a central tenet of Lathan’s tenure, the conviction that all students have access to similar, if not the same, opportunities regardless of the school they attend. The philosophy drives everything from the push to expand Advanced Placement classes and improve athletic fields at all three high schools to offering pull-out gifted education programs and the International Baccalaureate program at schools on both ends of the academic achievement spectrum.

But to Powell, this has also led to a highly centralized, heavy-handed administration that feeds the “culture of intimidation” Lathan’s critics say rules the district. The approach leaves no room for flexibility at individual schools or among individual principals, he said. The current reading curriculum, Reading Mastery, which replaced Open Court about four years ago, is an example.

“Emphatically, I believe in equal education and equal opportunity,” he said, recalling how the first time he met Lathan he was helping improve the playground and landscaping at Trewyn Middle School.

“Yet I do not believe the way to do that is to water down, dummy down what’s already working, whether implementing easier curriculums or using administrative placements to set schools up for success or failure.”

His family’s change will not affect his ability to lead Change150, Powell said. He compared it to a school board member who doesn’t have kids in school.

The Powell’s oldest son, Timothy, 14, is eager to leave Mark Bills Middle School. Trevor, 10, has mixed feelings. He’d rather follow a best friend to Lindbergh Middle School. The Powells contemplated asking for a waiver that would allow the boys to attend a District 150 school outside their neighborhood boundaries, but decided against it.

Page 2 of 4 - The bottom line is, with Trevor’s promotion to fifth grade, the Powells will no longer have a child at Charter Oak Primary School, the kindergarten-to-fourth grade school they can see from their living room window — the school at the center of the personal and political dust-ups that caused them to quit Peoria’s public schools. At least for now.

Their decision is among the latest in a series of spiraling thorny issues that kept Charter Oak in the spotlight for half of the past school year. The school and its staff, in some cases former staff, have been the backdrop for cascading conflicts since late last year when the district began investigating irregularities in how teachers administered standardized tests to special education students.

Angry parents, teachers and other supporters packed board meetings, the district disciplined four teachers and popular principal John Wetterauer, who eventually resigned. A state investigation of the testing irregularities acknowledged discrepancies in test scores but did not find conclusive evidence of cheating by teachers.

Instead of questioning why Charter Oak’s special education students scored so well on state-wide standardized tests, many parents said, the district should investigate why scores dropped once students moved to Mark Bills.

Their anger gave birth to Change150.

A small, disciplined action committee with a Facebook page and the ability to get out a few hundred supporters, Change150 ended up in the vanguard of various groups that have criticized Lathan’s leadership since 2012, from the teachers’ union to the NAACP.

The group leveraged the discontent into an age-old brand of political punishment. Moving from targeting Lathan to targeting a school board that consistently supported her, Change150 steered the coalition that soundly defeated board member Laura Petelle’s re-election bid against a protest candidate who pledged not to serve if elected.

By Aug. 15, District 150 board members must appoint a new member to fill a vacant seat. Petelle is among the eight applicants, as is a candidate endorsed by Change150, Dan Adler.

Whether or not Change150 influences the appointment, Powell said the group is scouting candidates for next year’s school board election, waiting for a follow-up meeting to an earlier one they had with two school board members and Lathan, and trying to stay focused on its mission to elect a board that will either oust Lathan or change the current philosophy.

If Change150 presents sticky challenges for District 150, the group has its own challenges.

Powell acknowledged Change150 have been perceived as middle-class white parents who did not care about principal turnover until it came to Charter Oak’s doorsteps.

“Guilty,“ he said.

Page 3 of 4 - Powell remembers watching a large protest led by the NAACP during a school board meeting at Charter Oak two years ago. The issue was the demotion of two principals. He recalled minimizing the controversy at the time to a simple, “OK, change is hard.”

Change is still hard. Change150’s challenge is to maintain its message and build coalitions without getting pulled in other directions.

“It’s difficult because we’ve become the catch-all for anyone who’s discontented with District 150.”

The group’s role is still evolving. “People think we’re a lot more together than we are,” Powell added.

He also acknowledges, as board members have often said, that Change150 and its supporters may not have access to the background information given to board members on certain matters.

“No doubt we’ve misread some issues, no doubt we don’t know everything they know,” Powell said. “I don’t think we’ve missed the target but, in some instances, we might have missed the bull’s-eye.”

The incident that resulted in Stephanie Powell being barred from school property may have stemmed from misunderstandings. The Powells don’t want to go into detail, though they’ve mentioned it on social media. Stephanie Powell uses a walker. She suffers from Stiff-Person Syndrome, a neurological disorder that can set off muscle spasms and stiffness when a person is stressed. It apparently played a role in the incident in which she bumped against Lathan.

District 150 had more to offer than they expected when they moved to Peoria in 2003. At the time, different factions were battling over the tenure of another superintendent, Kay Royster.

But the support services District 150 provides for children with special needs are among the attributes that dispelled images others gave them. Educational choices, dedicated staff and the district’s ethnic and religious diversity are also on their list of why they originally supported the district.

Both Powells say they became outspoken advocates, urging friends and acquaintances to stay in the school district. Their emotions about leaving are mixed with a little embarrassment.

“In fairness, I feel like we’ve had to eat some crow,” Powell said.

The couple is taking their children out of public schools, but they’re not breaking totally with the public school district. Both boys will probably still receive special services, such as speech therapy, provided by District 150, Stephanie Powell said.

And the couple isn’t closing the door on returning to the public school district. The cost of private school will be a strain on family finances. More importantly, the new school will be a change.